Optaros Blogs | Ecommerce

Groupon Fever: CityDeal Gets Another 5 Million Euro

jkrisch — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:15:06 +0000

The next round in CityDeal poker: Not two months have passed for the Groupon clone since their first 4 million euro, and now they are getting a 5 million euro injection from the Samwer house:

"The new investment comes from an international group made up of the Swedish Investment AV Kinnevik, along with Germany’s Holtzbrinck Ventures and eVenture Capital Partners and, of course, the Samwers’ own incubator Rocket Internet."

It would be interesting to know if the existing investor group would endlessly pump in money or if fixed limits have been set by some of the individual financiers for when they would throw in the towel.

Groupon has announced their European start for this year.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Groupon Fever: LivingSocial Nabs Another $25 Million

jkrisch — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:44:29 +0000

Not a long time ago, Groupon clone LivingSocial raised $5 million for itself. A few days ago, they put another $25 million on top:

"LivingSocial — which has more than a million daily email subscribers — is today announcing it’s raised a $25 million Series B round led by U.S. Venture Partners and including Grotech Ventures and Revolution Capital, bringing the company to a total of about $35 million raised.

That follows Groupon’s $30 million B round from Accel Partners and New Enterprise Associates announced in December."

Next in line in the US would be BuyWithMe again.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Swoopo Loses Another CEO

jkrisch — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:18:08 +0000

After the departure of CEO Gunnar Piening last December, his successor Ralph Werner has also left Swoopo at the beginning of February (after only 8 months).

Frank Han from the US is now leading the company. Since the participation of August Capital in April of last year, there has been no end to the unrest at the company.

Swoopo, with its innovative business model, counts as one of the pioneers of “extreme retailing” and is the catalyst for the global Penny Auction Boom.

Most recently, Swoopo has had to tone down their business model and reimburse users their participation fees after buying a product.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

The Amazon WebStore and the Shopping System of the Future

jkrisch — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:55:57 +0000

This is a further post for our loose series on “Shopping Systems of the Future”.

While the next e-commerce generation has long been hoping for new and more sales oriented shopping systems, in the classical warehouse oriented e-commerce world, Amazon is still the ultimate role model for online trade.

It should be then good news now for online and catalog-based shops. Amazon is currently testing a new webstore which will offer many of the Amazon shop functionalities to smaller merchants:

"Shake hands with the leader in ecommerce innovation, and succeed in your ecommerce endeavors."

The current shop systems from Amazon and similar marketplaces are slowly but surely reaching the limits of their conceptional extendibility and have therefore (according to our estimates) a rather short half-life. There is also the valid hope that via Magento and similar efforts, a new generation of solutions will rise over the next years offering e-commerce companies the same potential which nowadays still require custom development efforts.

How will (or must) shopping solutions look like in the next 5 to 10 years?

A few related posts related to this question:

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Extreme Retailing: Change Is Coming to Online Shopping

jkrisch — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:31:32 +0000

Everything is suddenly possible again in the e-commerce world. In the US in particular, interest in extreme e-commerce models is rising steeply (“Are you ready for extreme retailing?”).

Joshua Goldman from Norwest Venture Partners gave a short introduction to Swooponomics at the Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference:

Parallel to that, several American innovators met at the First Round Capital E-commerce Summit.

The comments of the event organizer (“Change is coming to online shopping”) corroborates much of what Exciting Commerce has been heralding since 2005 which was also self-evident at this year's Live Shopping Days Conference:

"One of the things that’s surprised me the most over the last decade is how little transformative innovation has occurred in ecommerce.

eBay looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago. Amazon looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago. While the top 10 sites on the Internet have changed dramatically over the last decade, the top 10 online shopping sites on the Internet have not.

The traditional catalog/cart shopping model remains pretty much unchanged. I’m not sure of the reasons why so little innovation has occurred – perhaps it is because of Google.

Specifically, the fact that online retailers had a scalable, measurable, and predictable source of customer traffic (through both SEO and Adwords) might have reduced the external pressures to innovate.

However, the online shopping paradigm is finally changing. Indeed, I think we’ve seen more innovation in the last 10 months than in the last 10 years.

We’ve seen an explosion of interesting technologies and opportunities that seek to change online shopping"

The American innovators cover a wide range of methods and models from alternative payment systems down to game mechanics.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Oliver Jung’s Global Shopping Club Empire

jkrisch — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:08:24 +0000

Brands4Friends Goes the World: It feels almost like there aren’t any more countries where B4F founding investor Oliver Jung and his cohorts haven’t got a shopping club investment stake.

A few days ago an announcement came by email which mentions for the first time publicly the “global shopping club alliance”:

"Australia’s leading by invitation only shopping club, brandsExclusive, announced it has raised substantial Series A funding from Trayas.

Trayas is led by Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung, who are also invested in a number of leading overseas shopping clubs including Turkish Markafoni.com, the Brasilian Brandsclub.com.br, the Swiss Fashionfriends.ch and the Indian FashionandYou.com.

“The global shopping club alliance, which has a combined membership of several million online shoppers worldwide, creates an amazing opportunity for Australian brands to reach a wider international audience, and for the Australian consumer to access more brands and even greater deals.” Says co-founder Daniel Jarosch."

Besides the known 9% of Brands4Friends that Oliver Jung holds, he also has a stake in Russian KupiVIP (which recently raised $20 million in funding), as well as the Canadian Beyond The Rack, who announced their financing round at the end of January.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Groupon Fever: How Groupon Wards Off Class Action Lawsuits

jkrisch — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:37:57 +0000

Overambitious lawyers are the bane of every serious startup company. At the moment, Groupon is finding it necessary to defend against a class action lawsuit in the USA - and is doing so with its customary tongue-in-cheek style (“Groupon Organizes Class Action Against Itself”):

"You may or may not have heard that a lawyer named Jay Edelson from a law firm called Edelson McGuire is attempting to organize a class action lawsuit against Groupon, claiming that our deals’ prominently displayed expiration dates somehow “systematically deceive our customers.”

We can think of two possible explanations for this lawsuit:

The law firm sees an opportunity to exploit our success and make a bunch of money.
We are indeed systematically deceiving our customers, but instead of taking advantage of our 100% open refund policy or telling us about their problems or sharing them in a public forum, our customers are secretly gossiping about them to each other and Edelson McGuire, kind of like Emily Johnson did against me in 9th grade (Emily if you are reading this I want my cabbage patch doll back)."

“Corporate Overlord” Andrew Mason reveals how Groupon would like to ward off self-inflicted lawsuits in the Groupon blog.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Web Currencies: Facebook Imposes 30% Tax on Credits

jkrisch — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:27:52 +0000

Facebook is getting serious with their efforts to create a global web currency. With the start of their closed beta phase, Facebook will burden their Facebook credits with a 30% fee.

Essentially that means that in the future, whoever participates in the Facebook driven economy will need to pay a sort of sales tax for each transaction.

It is still speculation, but the indication is that Facebook is trying to establish a transnational web currency which could someday become the currency standard for the Web.

Although in the official announcement it seems all quite virtual, clearly Facebook wants to earn real money and has last summer executed some tests with purchases of real physical goods.

If Facebook makes headway, significant resistance against a parallel world currency could be expected.

Since 2007 Facebook has extended its American investor circle increasingly with investors from China and Russia, thereby ensuring that the most important global economies are represented.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Game Mechanics: The Gameification of the Web World (video)

jkrisch — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:28:20 +0000

At latest since Facebook, the gameification of the (web) world is continuing its steady advance:

"Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era."

What can be learnt with this presentation, amongst others:

How to apply game mechanics outside of the web.
During conception and development of business models you can be much more creative by not neglecting the psychological factors.
That the much vaunted "convergence" doesn’t make any sense, if not from the technical nature of the problem, then at latest when it hits your wallet.

What is exciting about (social) games is that they mostly work with award systems rather than punitive systems. With awards it is often much easier to control or achieve desired behaviour.

Thanks to Florian Bailey for the video tip.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

The Polyvore Founders Give Way To Professional CEO

jkrisch — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:37:19 +0000

Be it Spreadshirt, Threadless, Etsy or now Polyvore, nowadays you can set your watch against the time it takes between a big round of financing and the point where investors lose their patience and get a professional CEO to take the reins.

And it isn’t as if they aren’t making enough efforts:

"A very high-profile hire for fashion site Polyvore.

The startup, which lets users mix and match products from any online store and then share their creations with others, has added Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who formerly led Google’s operations in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, as CEO.

Singh Cassidy had left Google in April in order to become CEO-in-residence at Accel Partners, saying that she was “ready to take the next step and run or grow my own company.” "

Polyvore has recently celebrated their third anniversary and had received a financing round of $5.6 million last August from Matrix Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Almost all social shopping sites of the first generation are finding it difficult to meet investors’ high expectations and are at the moment in the process of rethinking their strategies.

And although it repeatedly seems to make sense to bring in an outside CEO to professionalize the company, there is also substantial risk that the startup can lose their spirit in the process.

At least with Etsy, one of the founders was asked to come back and plans now to make innovative changes.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.